Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP Images
President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the White House Tribal Nations Summit at the Department of the Interior in Washington, December 6, 2023.
In decades (perhaps even centuries) to come, historians will focus on the 2024 presidential election much as they have on the election of 1860. They will understand, as too few Americans do today, that it will stand as a hinge point in American history.
My expectation—make that, my fear—is that they will focus most intensely on this question: Why were so many Democrats sleepwalking while the nation clearly teetered on the brink of authoritarian rule?
That question can (and must) be posed in a more specific way. With the prospect of a Donald Trump victory looming large, with polling showing that even Democratic base voters give Trump a higher approval rating than they accord President Biden, why did Democrats opt to run their weakest candidate—Biden—against Trump? Even as poll after poll showed Trump leading Biden in swing states, even as the electorate identified Biden’s presidency primarily with inflation and the high cost of living, even as Democratic House and Senate candidates were polling above Biden in swing states and nationally, even as Democratic governors had generally high approval ratings, why, oh why did the Democrats fail to run a serious primary opponent to Biden in the spring of 2024?
Well, we know why. Given the cards he was dealt (a two-year congressional majority that teetered on a razor’s edge), Biden did extremely well. He managed to get through Congress landmark legislation on rebuilding America’s industrial base, on mitigating the climate crisis, on restoring the nation’s sagging infrastructure, all while putting himself on the line for and with American workers as no president had ever done before. By most metrics, he’s been an excellent president, not just committed to restoring the country’s long-vanished mass prosperity but actually doing something about it.
And yet, that hasn’t made him the favorite in an election that will almost surely pit him against a candidate who poses the greatest threat to American democracy of anyone in our country’s long history. With each new poll, the popular discontent with the state of the nation—more particularly, the state of its economy; most particularly, the cost of living—rises ever higher, even despite the declines in the price of gas and some other essentials. And in each new poll, the doubts about Biden’s age remain constant.
Those discontents and those doubts are connected. Biden is no longer able, save in the rarest of instances, to make a forceful defense of his very real economic achievements. That’s more than a problem of inadequate delivery, however. The other problem is that he’s been highlighting the wrong achievements.
As Stan Greenberg’s polling for Democracy Corps has clearly documented, the number one issue for Americans—and for the constituencies that make up the Democratic base (young people, Blacks, Latinos, single women)—is the high price of food, shelter, and other necessities. A gap of nearly 30 percentage points separates this concern from the various (according to which group’s sample we look at) second-ranking concerns, be they crime, the climate, or other very real problems.
With the prospect of a Donald Trump victory looming large, why did Democrats opt to run their weakest candidate against Trump?
Greenberg suggests that Biden focus on his underpublicized policies that have reduced prices, such as his (all too selective and still pending) price reductions to certain prescription drugs. He suggests Biden campaign on policies that were highly popular within the Democratic base, the Child Tax Credit most particularly, that Congress failed to make permanent. He encourages Biden to go after corporations’ record-high profit margins, which the Biden campaign has just begun to do.
Biden—or any Democratic candidate—could do a lot more. As my colleague David Dayen noted last week, the administration has announced that the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act permits them to lower prices on overpriced prescription drugs that were developed with federal funds. David rightly added that having made this announcement, the administration has not actually acted on it, a move that would be wildly popular with actually existing Americans. Biden could make that move. He could call for an excess profits tax. He could at least threaten and in some cases seek to impose price controls on markets with unaffordable costs. He could revive particulars of the unenacted Build Back Better bill, such as affordable child care and free community college. Those could, and should, be among the particulars of his what-I’ll-do-in-a-second-term stump speech, particularly if he has a Democratic Congress.
That, or something like that, is the program to rebuild the currently alienated Democratic base and win some swing voters as well. Whether Biden is the person who can sell it is the question, as the program is there for the taking by any Democratic candidate.
Polling (not just Stan’s, but most everyone’s) tells us he’s not. Even as polls show Biden trailing Trump in the swing states, they also show the “generic Democrat” winning, and nongeneric Democratic House and Senate candidates running well ahead of Biden for their respective offices. Of course, the alternatives to Biden won’t be generic; they’ll be governors or senators whom right-wing media will savage. They’d bring to the race their own weaknesses: California Gov. Gavin Newsom lacks appeal to working-class voters (California has the lowest share of white working-class residents of any state save Hawaii); Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whom I consider a strong candidate, would nonetheless face misogynistic hurdles; and so on.
But such candidates would also bring real strengths to the contest: their relative youth; the break from the Trump-Biden rematch that so many Americans find so dispiriting; their absence of Biden baggage, both actual and media-created; their ability to make the case for popular progressive programs and to take the attack to Trump in ways more forceful and just plain audible than Biden.
It’s already too late, to be sure, for Democrats to file for a number of states’ primaries. But if Biden’s numbers don’t improve, if, say, Dean Phillips does unexpectedly well in New Hampshire (if he does, that will be entirely about Biden, not the almost completely unknown Phillips), Democrats could still enter the late primaries and, should they best Biden, come to the convention asking Biden to release his delegates. Under this or a similar scenario, Biden, who’s done the nation great services in the course of his career and his presidency, might opt to do one more and drop out.
None of this would matter all that much if Trump were a Republican of yore or less of an authoritarian sociopath. But with the future of democracy in America at stake as it really has never been before, it matters tremendously. I can only hope that when future historians look back on 2024, the question they ask isn’t “Why were the Democrats sleepwalking?”
